


On the Run

by shoreleave



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Tarsus IV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-09
Updated: 2010-11-09
Packaged: 2017-10-13 03:37:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/132415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoreleave/pseuds/shoreleave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uhura gradually discovers that Jim is hiding something in his past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Run

They've been on the run all day.

The mission went wrong in every way possible: misunderstandings and poor timing, cultural blunders and bad luck. Now their weapons and communicators have been taken and they are running for their lives, back into the forest-covered hills, hoping to distance themselves from the village long enough for a search party to find them.

It's cold, and getting dark. They're carrying very little food, no more than a few emergency wafers.

She hates the helplessness of their situation, but is smugly pleased to realize that she has an important contribution to make to their survival. “Captain,” she says when they first take a break from their initial mad scramble away from their captors, “you never took the advanced Academy survival course, did you?”

She knows he didn’t. It was for fourth-years, and he’d only completed three when he’d been promoted to command.

“No. I never did.”

“Well, I did,” she says. “I can lead us from here.” The week-long course had been grueling and unpleasant, but she’d come out of it with a range of new skills, from orienteering to foraging to building a fire from scratch. She is confident she’ll be able to navigate in this wilderness, and she's glad to have the opportunity to reveal some of her lesser-known talents to him. She’d done very well in the course. Top marks.

And he's such an arrogant show-off, always sure that he's right. Maybe this will be fun. Here, he's at a disadvantage.

He looks at her with a strange expression on his face, as if he's about to say something, but changed his mind. “All right, Lieutenant. You’re in charge. I’ll follow.”

She stops to take a long look at their surroundings, memorizing the lay of the land before darkness falls. From far away, they can hear the shouts of their pursuers, and her stomach tightens. This isn’t an Academy course; they really _are_ running for their lives.

“This way,” she points. They begin to move up the hill as quickly as they can.

 

He lets her lead. For now.

_don’t give away too much too fast don’t do it unless you have to_

He shadows her movements, makes his own decisions. But as long as she doesn’t lead them astray, he doesn’t say anything. It’s good experience for her.

As darkness falls, though, her confidence falters. She’s not good at finding her way in the dark. He makes light suggestions, which she follows grudgingly. He makes gentle corrections in the direction they are taking. He admonishes her to move more quietly. She's still in the lead, but he's taking a more active role.

But when she points to an exposed clearing and signals to him that they will make their shelter there for the night, he has to object. He won’t let her endanger them.

“No,” he shakes his head, indicating an area further in the woods, about twenty meters beyond the edge of the clearing. “There.”

“Why?” She's irritated and tired. She has a long, deep scratch running up her forearm, which must be painful. She doesn’t like the fact that he’s questioning her decisions, but he has no choice.

“Better camouflage, and see that small cave there? We can make a fire.”

She acquiesces grumpily and follows him. He can read the look on her face as clear as the words she doesn’t dare say to him: If you’re so smart, why don’t you do it?

He smiles wryly to himself as he begins to work. It's all coming back to him, so familiar.

Some things you never forget. Even when you want to.

 

She watches, astonished, as he expertly builds a waterproof shelter. He tells her to rest while he gathers wood and lights a small fire, using a flint-like rock to elicit a spark from his chronometer. Then he removes his yellow shirt and tears off the sleeves, using one to bandage her injured arm and the other as a makeshift sling. 

“You never took a survival course,” she says suspiciously. “Where did you learn all this?”

“I said that I never took the _Academy_ course,” he corrects her. “I learned it when I was a kid.”

“In _Iowa?_ ” He is lying. He must be.

He chuckles. “No, not in Iowa. There are no wildernesses in Iowa, believe me.”

Then it dawns on her. “Oh, I get it,” she says nastily. “You took one of those pseudo-survival courses for bored rich kids looking for stimulation…”

He's annoyed. “Look, Uhura, I don’t know what you’ve been thinking about my family, but we weren’t rich. And I wasn’t bored, believe me. By the time I was fourteen, I was getting so much stimulation they almost locked me up a couple of times.” He grins at her disarmingly. It's no secret that the captain was a hard drinker and a troublemaker in his youth.

She's angry at the way he taunts her, and furious at all of her own mistakes that day, including the stupid misstep that tore up her forearm and the dumb dumb dumb suggestion that they camp in a clearing. She wants to wipe the overconfident grin off his face.

“Sometimes kids who get in trouble are taken on survival courses,” she says, watching his face carefully. “It’s supposed to get them away from a bad environment and teach them to rely on themselves in new ways…”

“Is that right.”

“Was that the course?” she presses. She can’t seem to let it go.

He sighs and glares at her. “No, Uhura, that wasn’t it. It was off-planet, okay? I took a survival course when I was visiting my aunt and uncle on a colony world.”

"When you were fourteen."

"Right."

“How long was this course?”

“A few weeks.”

“It must have been a very good course. You seem to know what you’re doing.”

“I learned a lot.”

“How many kids were in your group?”

He hesitates. “About ten, at first. Then, for a couple of days, I was alone.” His voice is tight.

She softens. “That must have been scary, being alone on a strange planet.”

He shrugs. “I wasn’t completely alone. I could hear the adults nearby.” She doesn’t understand the anger in his voice. Could it be that he resented being made to have such a frightening experience? And why would anyone send a child to be endangered? It doesn’t make sense.

They decide to eat the last of their Starfleet rations, and attempt to forage for food the next day. He breaks one of the wafers in half and takes that, and gives her the other half along with the other whole wafer. He ignores her protests.

“We share equally,” she says flatly. She hates being treated as inferior or weak. Even if he's acting out of some archaic form of chivalry, she won’t accept it. Men need more calories than women so even an equal share will give her relatively more.

“Uhura,” he says patiently. “What’s the longest time you’ve ever been without food?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Answer my question.”

“I don’t know. Maybe thirty-six hours…” She's exaggerating. It was only twenty-six, during a ritual fast. By the end of that time, she recalls, her head was spinning and she could barely lift any of her limbs in order to drink the tea that was offered to her. She has no desire to repeat that experience, but she's a Starfleet officer now, and she’ll do what she has to.

“That’s what I thought.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she says, exasperated.

“Look, it’s no reflection on you,” he says, and his expression is serious. “But you don’t know how your body will react if you’ve never been really hungry before.“

“And you have.”

“I told you, I did this survival course when I was a kid—“

“Oh, come off it, captain! No survival course, even one on a colony, would allow a child to—“ 

“And besides,” he interrupts, “you’re injured.”

“What, this?” She lifts her arm. “It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”

He laughs then. “Now you sound like me.”

It’s true, he always downplays injuries, denies that he needs treatment, pretends that he’s not in pain when clearly he is. It’s one of his quirks that she’s actually rather fond of. “Well, captain, we never believe you either, you know.

He smiles. “Old habits die hard.”

She sighs and takes the wafers. A few bites of the high-caloric bar do a lot to buoy her spirits. “Where was this course?” she continues. “I’d like to do it.” 

“You can’t. It’s been discontinued.”

“Naturally. Come on, Kirk, where did you really learn survival skills? From a book?”

He looks at her for a long moment, then suddenly grins. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” 

She hates that he’s playing games with her. “What, it’s classified? Is that what you’re saying?” She can’t quite keep the disdain from her voice, and she hopes perversely that he can hear it.

He laughs at her. “Come on, Uhura, does that make sense to you? What could I possibly have done as a teenager that would have to be classified?”

It does seem ridiculous. She’s angry at herself for letting him get to her. But it galls her, that he has this superior knowledge yet won’t admit where he got it. He’s hiding something. 

He sees that she is in a bad mood, so he decides to distract her. In whispers, they play crazy linguistic and memory games that he invents. Soon she's laughing so hard that her side aches from trying to stifle the noise.  

His memory is truly phenomenal, she realizes. In “Name That Regulation,” he recalls the entire Starfleet legal code almost word for word, and he can even name all sixteen of the Major Exceptions to the Prime Directive of First Contact.

“I thought that you didn’t follow regulations because you weren’t aware of them all,” she giggles. “Now I know it’s all a ruse.”

“Oh, I know them,” he replies with an offended air. “I just use my own judgment every once in a while.”

Of course, she totally demolishes him in “Insult the Alien,” where one player comes up with a curse in an alien language, and the other has to name the language (one point), give a full translation (three points), or reply in kind (five points).  He's a linguistic dabbler, with a certain amount of raw talent, but can't touch her knowledge base. She suspects that he chose this game as a way to mollify her bruised ego. She's winning, 25 to 9.

He speaks in a funny stream of clicking sounds, which she can’t identify at all. “Say it again,” she says. Again the odd clicking noises. She shakes her head. “You win that one. What is it?”

“It’s Xindi. It means, ‘Your mother has eyebrows,’ which is a big insult to them.’”

“It’s _Xindi_?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you learn Xindi?”

“On the colony, from one of my friends. I just know a few words,” he says hastily. “Look, Uhura, I’m really tired, you take first watch.” He settles himself into the leaves where they are lying, folding his arms across his stomach, and closes his eyes. A hint, if she’d ever seen one.

But she doesn’t want to let it go. “What colony was this?”

“Where my aunt and uncle lived, I told you. Goodnight, Uhura. Wake me in two hours.”

He's asleep almost immediately. She listens to his even breathing, then reaches further out, listening for other, more threatening noises. Her hearing is acute.

Nothing. If they are still being pursued, then the villagers are sleeping, too.

 

Her mind drifts.

She's disturbed by his enigmatic half-answers. She doesn’t understand why he won’t just be honest with her. So often, he’s like an open book; why is he being so cagey now? It’s like a puzzle, and she tries to put it together.

A survival course for kids. Wilderness orienteering.

Starvation.

Alone for days. What kind of…

She freezes.

_What, it’s classified? Is that what you’re saying?_

_What could I possibly have done as a teenager that would have to be classified?_

He never answered her question, she realizes. He misdirected her with another question.

On a colony.

When he was fourteen.

Oh, my God. It can’t be…

She moves over to him quietly and whispers into his ear. “Kirk, wake up!”

“Mmm…”

“How old are you now?”

He blinks at her. “What? Uhura, I’m sleeping…”

She shakes his shoulders a little. “No. Answer my question first. How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-seven. Finish your watch, Uhura. That’s an order.” He closes his eyes again.

She calculates quickly. Thirteen years ago. It fits.

“You were visiting your aunt and uncle.”

“Mmm.”

“They lived on a colony.”

He opens his eyes again, looking at her quizzically. “This isn’t another memory game, Uhura. What’s your point?”

“You had to survive on your own.”

He nods.

“You were alone.”

“I told you, it was—“

“It was the Tarsus Massacre!” she says, looking right into his eyes. “You were there!”

She waits for him to deny it. She wants him to tell her to shut up and go back to sleep, that she’s being ridiculous. She hopes hopes hopes that she is wrong.

But she isn't.

His face is blank.

 

_she can’t know no one can know how stupid could I be_

“You were starving.”

“The food supplies were destroyed."

 _your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of society and your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony_  

“What happened to your aunt and uncle?” she says quietly, sadly.

“They were rounded up and killed.”

_horrific screams thousands of voices silenced suddenly drowned out by the whine of phaser fire_

“You were alone?”

“They were hunting me,” he whispers. “I was a witness.”

_boy we know you’re here we have food for you come in from the cold we’ll protect you_

“You were rescued…”

“It was too late. Half the colonists had been killed.” 

_mom don’t touch me leave me alone I’m not a little boy anymore_

“Who else knows?”

“Starfleet knows. But no one on board.”

“Not even Dr. McCoy?”

“The files were sealed. The records were removed.”

_it’s for your own protection jim as a witness_

“You should tell him.”

He shakes his head. “I never talk about it.”

He looks at her but doesn’t really see her. He's seeing other faces.  

 

His voice is controlled but his face tells her everything. 

She hates herself for forcing the admission out of him.

“Jim?” she calls softly, but he doesn’t respond. She doesn’t really expect him to. He's lost in memories. His jaw is clamped down but a muscle twitches.

She tries to imagine what an experience of that sort would do to a 14-year-old farmboy.

She desperately wants to help.

She can only think of one thing to do. She takes his face in her hands and kisses him, slowly and deeply. She caresses him and whispers words of comfort to him.

It works eventually, as she had hoped it would. At first, his body is frozen, wooden. But she is relentless. He doesn’t push her away. His arms tighten around her and he kisses her back. 

They are as quiet as they can be.

 


End file.
